Getting Clients - A Few Options

Probably the number one comment I get about people who are looking to find reasons to avoid all the business issues of photography - that is - improving their bad practices for good ones - is that their current clients have come to accept things like buyouts/all-rights/work-for-hire; no shipping charges; no post-production charges, and so forth.

"How do I start charging my clients for these things now?" I get asked.

You don't.

"Then how do I get clients that will pay for these things?"

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Get new clients.

But it's supposedly not that simple.

But it is easier.

First though, let me backup. If you've been in business for awhile, and not been doing things right, you have clients that expect too much for free, or too much for way too cheap. It would be problematic for you to simply alter your business practices overnight for these clients. You'd likely loose them - before you're ready.

Instead, make the decision that as of today every client you take on will be handled differently. Appropriate fees, licenses, contracts, and so forth. Eventually, you will be so busy working for these clients that you won't have time to work for your previous clients, and you will transition away from them. Or, you may be able to sustain your business with your new clients, and grow your business by migrating your old clients to your new way of doing business.

How to find new clients?

Tuscon photographer Will Seberger forwarded me a post from his blog - WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD, THE WEIRD TURN PRO, which has a number of great insights, and is well worth a read. Will brought to my attention Mastheads.org, so I thought I'd take a look:
And it looks interesting. For $24 a year, you get to see the mastheads of just over 600 publications. Yet, that's less than 25% of the magazines that are available in ADBASE's North American database alone.

Is this the "craiglist" version of ADBASE and AgencyAccess? Quite possibly. It also appears that as other members submit mastheads, their list grows, so it is, to one degree or another, reliant upon other members to submit the masthead information.

To get alternative perspectives on this, I turned to the folks at ADBASE and AgencyAccess for their take. Nelson Nunes, President & Co-Founder of ADBASE, which has been around for over a decade, wrote "Mastheads.org is good if you are only interested in getting a few names off of a select number of mastheads. If you need to create or update a mailing list for direct marketing purposes, you would still have a considerable amount of work to do."

Ok, so what do the folks at AgencyAccess think?

Keith Gentile, CEO and Co-Founder of AgencyAccess commented "Mastheads.org is a great secondary source for photographers for research. AgencyAccess takes their data a step further by allowing photographers to customized these lists by specialties, titles, locations, hire frequency and much more...With AgencyAccess you are also paying for these added features which you will not get at Mastheads.org. I do however recommend getting the service as an extra as it can be helpful."

Ok, on the surface, it seems like spending the $24 isn't a bad idea, but as a complement to either of the above services. but there are risks to just relying on Mastheads.org.

Nelson Nunes at ADBASE wrote "you would still have to analyze the masthead to determine which contacts are of interest to you (i.e. involved in selecting a photographer), enter all the information into a database and double check every piece of information to make sure you didn't make any entry mistakes. The first time you do this, you would also have to check that the address provided in the masthead is the correct address for the contacts of interest to you as generally the contact information provided is for the advertising sales department." And that's a good point. Doing so takes a great deal of time, and the amount of time involved adds up fast.

Nunes continued and he noted what I had already concluded, but his math and explaination is succinct, I'll note it here:"say you can scan through a masthead every 5 minutes (which is aggressive if you include double checking and breaks -- it's pretty tedious work), that's 12 per hour on average. If you have a list of 600 magazines, that will take about 50 hours. Even if you have an assistant working for only $10 per hour, that's more than the cost of subscribing to a full-year Editorial Edition from ADBASE that also includes book publishers. Now that's for only one update. If you plan to send out additional mailings throughout the year, you will have to update the list again costing your more time and money."

And I can't stress enough the value of accuracy. When I get correspondence with my name spelled "Jon", or "Herrington", it's a dead ringer that the sender isn't starting off on the right foot. In fact, I have been known to purposefully misspell my name on some forms I have to fill out just to see how they use/re-use/sell my name. When the person's name on the masthead says "Kathryn Taylor", and you start your e-mail off to them "Dear Kathryn", and anyone who knows her knows she goes by "Kate", to her, that's a dead ringer that you're someone to ignore. So too with "Dear Patricia" for Pat, "Dear Clifford" for Cliff, and so forth.

Keith Gentile over at AgencyAccess noted "Agency Access also allows the client to download the list as labels, telemarketing reports and text files making it easy for the client to send out emails and mailings. The advanced tools of AgencyAccess allows the photographer to efficiently promote their services in a timely fashion." Time. I can't stress it enough. So many people just don't start (or maintain) a marketing program because the way they are doing it takes time and effort. The tools that both of these provide makes it so fast and easy to maintain, it's of value just for those tools, not to mention the list of e-mail addresses at your fingertips. The ability to go into a service, track who got what, when, and to be able to further refine your search is critical. I wrote about this (Kenny Rogers Had A Point, 4/21/08), and how it works.

What is missing, however, is that Mastheads.org is all about MASTHEADS. EDITORIAL MASTHEADS. The resources of ADBASE and AgencyAccess includes Art Directors, Design Firms, Creative Directors, Art Buyers, and so forth, and so on.

Nelson summed it up well when he wrote "Mastheads.org is not a replacement for a fully researched comprehensive database like ADBASE that guarantees accuracy. Furthermore, if you need to create or maintain a mailing list for direct marketing purposes, so much work is involved in extracting a proper mailing list from Mastheads.org that the cost of an ADBASE subscription more than pays for itself."

I couldn't agree more.

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Cooperating with the Uncomfortable

I get that dealing with the business end of photography isn't always comfortable. Whether it's determing the specific fees and applicable production charges for an assignment, providing an explanation to a client about a particular item (i.e. "what is post-production? Can't you just copy the photos off the card and burn me a CD - that's all I really need...") so that they not only understand, but they can explain it to their superiors/client, and be on board with it, or calling up a delinquent client about an overdue invoice, all of these, and countless more situations frequently make photographers queasy, even week in the knees.

Frankly, you don't actually have to worry about these things.

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That is, if you don't want to be in business very long, or if you want to slowly sink your business into the ground.

I was reading my Sunday Washington Post, and the 7/6/08 article Art's Real Thing Was Never Sold On Success, struck me, but not for the reason that was intended. At the end of the article, the artist Chuck Connelly said "I'm not like a 9-to-5-er, get up and paint. I can lounge around all day, get up and put a couple of strokes on something. It's not how much you do. It's that you do the right thing."

When you are just starting out, don't worry about having an assignment every day, or even every week. Worry that each assignment you do is done right. From a qualitiative standpoint, as well as a business standpoint.

This past weekend, I covered the AT&T National Golf Tournament. When my assistant asked what the dress code was, I told her I would be in Khakis and a polo, and she should dress accordingly. When I got there, there were many spectators who were in shorts, t-shirts, and jeans. Though, everyone that was working for the tournament was wearing some variation of khakis and a polo. Immediately, we stood out as being there as a professional doing a job, and we received the respect we were due. I wrote a piece back on June 1 (Proper Attire Whilst Making Pictures, 6/1/08) and it's worth revisiting.

Ensuring that your paperwork is in order, with signatures from clients on contracts/estimates, alleviates other issues down the line, from bad language on purchase orders that come along, to misunderstandings over who owns what.

Moreover, practice explaining things like what post-production is, and why the client should be paying for it; why there's markup on certain items, and what the difference is between a creative fee and usage fee. Oh, and why the client doesn't own the images to do with them whatever they want.

discussing these things - especially at first - is uncomfortable. Add to that uncomfortable situation the fact that you want this client to like you, and to hire you, and yes, to pay you a fair fee for these things, and it gets worse, because things like money are on the line that pays the rent and electricity, and so forth.

But heck, if you'd rather not, then don't bother. You won't be around very long. Your choice. The problem though, is that you'll just make it that much harder for your friends and colleagues who are making the effort to cooperate with the uncomfortable.

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Digital Railroad's Market Breakdown

I was pleased last week when I stumbled across a BusinessWeek piece on John McCain, which ran an image that was probably 1/2 page, black and white, which had at the end of the photo credit"/DRR.net". Contemplating DRR's inroads into the market, I found a piece well worth reading - SAA ombudsman David Sanger's Q&A (Charles Mauzy responds to questions from SAA ombudsman David Sanger, 7/3/08) that appeared on the DRR blog, with Charles Mauzy about the shift out of beta for their Marketplace services, their market breakdown, and their justification for the price change paid to photographers from 80% to 70%. We were very critical of DRR's move on this (70 Is The New 80 - Digital Railroad's Mis-Step, 7/3/08), but Mauzy provides thoughtful responses on this, and many other points.

One I'd like to echo, and which StockPhotoTalk did as well, is Mauzy's breakdown of their market:

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"Up to today our sales by industry segment have been definitely weighted to the editorial buyers. Over the first 6 months of MP 25% of our sales were to Magazine Publishers, 24% to Book Publishers, and 5 % to Newspapers. Corporate buyers comprised 23% and the Advertising plus Graphic Design firms combined for 19%."

As for moving forward, Mauzy went on:

We are very focused on shifting this mix to increase the percentage of sales going into the Advertising and Graphic Design segments where there is still a proven need for higher value rights-managed imagery and licensing fees are higher in general. To add some color to this, over the same 6 month period our average license fee per transaction into the Advertising segment was $609 and into the Magazine Pub segment $243.

Now those are some insightful numbers. It makes perfect sense to be moving in that direction - towards the more profitable per-image sales.

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Magnum's Buzzkill - OnRequest Deal Dead?

Back in January, we were critical of Magnum's deal with OnRequest, and just how bad an idea it was (Message to Magnum - Pass The Dutchie, You've Had Too Much, 1/18/08), where Magnum's efforts to expand into commercial/corporate work was to be handled by OnRequest.

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Now, if the whispering is true (and I expect it is), that deal is dead. Apparently, Magnum wanted more control of the production end of things, and OnRequest said no, and a power struggle ensued. Inquiries to Magnum head Mark Lubell seeking comment, were not returned.

Well, it seems that just a few months have gone by, and the high that was, is now the dim afterglow of roaches in the ashtray, the beer is gone, the sun is rising on a new day, and the lingering effects of a hangover are clearing the haze that caused this deal to happen in the first place.

With this the case, I say - Good move Magnum, and isn't this about strike 3 for OnRequest?

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70 Is The New 80 - Digital Railroad's Mis-Step

I recall with great fanfare the buttons and messaging - "80 is the new 20" that was heralded from the booth of Digital Railroad during last year's PhotoPlus Expo (PhotoPlus Expo Day 2 - Highlights, 10/20/07). What exactly does that mean, I wondered.

The explanation was quite simple, actually. Major agencies were collecting, say, $100 for an image license, and paying the photographer $20, or, a 20% commission. Conversely, Digital Railroad instituted just the opposite approach - paying photographers 80% of the sale, and keeping 20%. To me, that made perfect sense.

Until now.

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Before I get into that, let me go back a bit. Back in the days of film, it was common for there to be a 50/50 split, and it was justified because your agency marketed your images, their library, handled requests, sent film out, billed for the use, recieved fillm back, refiled it, and so forth. It WAS a lot of work. Now, images sit on servers, and there's little manual labor involved. So, it would make sense that the 50/50 would shift in the photographer's favor. I know that when I took a large collection of images to a library, I was successful in negotiating 60/40 for me. As costs diminished, it would only make sense that things would swing in photographer's favor. But that was not to be, thanks to Getty and Corbis.

When Digital Railroad announced their percentages, (DRR was the first to put out their percentages over PhotoShelter), I expected that it would be 85/15, and then I was disappointed with it was 80/20. As someone with images with both, 80/20 was not what I was hoping for.

Then, PhotoShelter came out with 70/30, and I was frustrated by that. But, both were surely better than a 50/50 deal.

Amongst the many comparisons that were made, by me, and many others, It remained that Digital Railroad continued to offer 10% more per license sale than PhotoShelter. To some photographers I talked to, they considered that a selling point. However, they also factored in the $50 a month they would have to pay to be in Digital Railroad, against the cost of - "free" with PhotoShelter, and thus, it was bet that they would do better without the monthly fee, and thus, some opted to go that route.

For me, I use both services to also service client image requests and assignment delivery, so paying for both (PhotoShelter does offer a Personal Archive paid package of services too) gave me the ability to service those clients, and so paying isn't such a big deal for me.

Which brings me to the "70 is the new 80" problem.

Yesterday, in my inbox, an e-mail arrived titled "Important Pricing Changes to Your Account". Uh Oh. That can't be a good title for an e-mail, I thought.

They first couched the bad news by something good. They're selling 80GB of storage for an extra nickel. $0.05. That's like, $0.60 a year. Could it be that there's just extra server space sitting around?

But then comes the reason for that $0.60 offer:

We are also announcing another important pricing change: our Marketplace transaction fee. With our recent release of robust automation tools (our new automated price calculator in particular), strong month over month growth in Marketplace traffic and Marketplace sales, we've officially moved out of our Marketplace beta period. To reflect the changes that are bringing significant value to our members, we're increasing our image-licensing transaction fee from 20% to 30%.

Then they say:

Digital Railroad is as committed as ever to returning the bulk of the licensing fees to our members – now and in the future.

Actually, no. If you were that committed, you wouldn't have decided to take another 10%. "the bulk"? Why not say "a majority", so we know that it's headed downwards again, until it arrives at 51%, in a year or less?

Then they wrote:

if you've recently renewed your subscription and it's not set to expire for several months, please note that we will respect your current agreement until your next renewal date. All new pricing and fees will then apply upon renewal.

Does this mean that you won't get that extra 80GB for the additional $0.05/mo unless you also agree to a 10% per sale reduction? Hmmm.

Back in January, we wrote about staffing cuts (Digital Railroad makes major layoffs, 1/10/08), which ended up being about 50% of the total number of people working for them, both on staff, and contractors, and in November I wrote about a major leadership change (Stepping Down, or Stepping Up? DRR's Nisselson Makes A Change, 11/21/07), which, from all appearances, ended up being the eventual shift out of Nisselson, actually, if not symbolically. I've heard of some folks who are not getting their customer service calls returned, as a result of a slashed staff.

This move removes one differentiator that I think photographers looked at when making their decision to choose a service platform, between Digital Railroad and PhotoShelter.

Bad move DRR.

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Image Recognition and the Future

My colleague over at PDNPulse - Daryl Lang - wrote about Google (Google: We Will Organize You, 7/1/08) , and the concept of autonomously recognizing subject matter within an image.

This reminded me of conference I attended - Department of Energy Computational Science Annual Fellows' Conference, where I was fascinated by a presentation by Kristen Grauman on Scalable Image Recognition and Retrieval. Grauman was the recipient of a scholarship for her work in this field, and her presentation - all 43 minutes of it, can be seen here (stick with it for the first 45 seconds of audio, her visual presentation starts at 45 seconds). Having seen it live, I still enjoy watching, and re-watching, the presentation online.

If you'd like to see even more of her research, including her 2006 presentation that I also saw, click here. For those of you interested in this, it's remarkable to see how concepts like human to computer interfaces, manual keywording, and image sorting by subject will be done much more automatically in the future. This also may be one of the ways in which images are recognized in the Orphan Works issue.

Image a photograph of a panda bear, with a link next to it that reads "Click to view more like this". Kristen, and Google, will likely be among the solutions to the visual database. At the 3:13 mark in the first video Kristen talks about object recognition within an image (identifiying a specific person or building), and the category mode (like buildings being similar, or animals, and so forth). It REALLY starts to get interesting at about 6 minutes, but BOTH videos are well worth your time. (Check the PDF's of each presentation that are available via the link for a higher resolution version of each presentation, and the abstract above the video.) Her bio as a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, can be seen here, which includes her e-mail address if you're so inclined to learn more about her research.

Google's R.J. Pittman, Director of Product Management (as seen on Beet.tv here) should be calling Kristen ASAP about her research!

Fascinating.

(Comments, if any, after the Jump)

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Orphan Works & Image Recognition

One of the big problems with Orphan Works is how do you describe something like a dog on a beach. Are the clouds white or grey, blue sky or sunset, stormy or clear, sandy beach or rocky one? The descriptions of visuals is a huge problem, which is why there is a huge push to have the databases (sometimes called 'registries') for works that are to be considered orphaned, be required to have a way to upload the intended image, and have it reside in the registry/database, and that, in turn, the images be compared to images that visual artists have uploaded to see if there is a content match. How, on earth, would you do that?

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Enter services like PicScout, TinEye, Attributor, and others. PicScout was chosen to testify before Congress on the subject (see article here), and TinEye's slogan is "TinEye does for images, what Google does for text..." (check out their video here, and their blog here). Hmm, do they want Google to buy them, perhaps? Oh, but I digress....

...And, Google already does this for video. Google has what they call a "content id" (see here) where you upload a video, and whenever video that matches that is uploaded to Google Video (YouTube anyone?) the content distribution is restricted. From Google:

The digital content identification file which corresponds to a reference file (a piece of content like a movie, music or other audiovisual material). This file is generated using Google software and is also known as a "fingerprint."...The solution is very accurate in finding uploads that look similar to reference files that are of sufficient length and quality to generate an effective ID File. The system is tuned to offer the best possible automated matches while eliminating most false positive matches. We are constantly tuning the system to deal with attempts to circumvent it, therefore exact rates are not available...Google Video is committed to giving copyright owners the ability to maximize their choice in how their content is made available on the site. Content identification is the latest tool that Google Video offers content owners to more easily identify and manage the use of their content on the site.."

What does this mean for you? Well, you'd better have a digital copy of every image of yours you want protected against becoming Orphaned, so you can upload your images to TinEye or PicScout (for a fee per image, of course), or whatever future image recognition capability Google creates (which they will figure out some way to monetize), so that when people in the next few years want to use your image, they can find you. This presumes that these are the solutions that are integrated into the proposed two registries, which is where you'd end up having to upload your images to.

How much will it cost you to upload each image? $0.01? $1.00? For me, that equates to potentially tens of thousands of dollars, even once I already have them all scanned!

Of course, whichever of these companies succeeds and breaks away from the pack will almost certainly be acquired by a major player in the stock photo business, or perhaps more likely --- by Google, or Microsoft or a media conglomerate. Scary thought, as this would place the content, operation and pricing of the entire database of images from thousands of owners and competitors under the control of a single, major stakeholder. One other option would be the PLUS Coalition, which I've written about before, which is an international umbrella group that represents the interests of all industries involved in creating, distributing, using and preserving images. To protect the interests of all concerned, the PLUS Coalition is busy creating the PLUS Registry.

Actually it will be an integrated system of registries that will be operated on a non-profit basis, as a community resource, and will place the control of pricing and usage of the registry in the hands of an industry-neutral organization. The PLUS Registry will include an Image Registry, with image recognition capabilities, and given that photographers, customers and stock agencies are all participating in PLUS, the PLUS Registry is likely to become the registry of choice. It will be interesting to see which image recognition company partners with PLUS, to support what will almost certainly be the largest registry in the industry.

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